It's Just My Opinion

Border guards

Here is more on that suggestion for the bobcats on the border only this time I suggest we use 'Monkeyoates'!

From Reporter Timmy Klarc
DILLEY, Texas (CNN) -- Six hundred Japanese snow monkeys are down on the farm, but maybe not for long. The red-faced droves of energetic simians roam the mesquite-covered ranch in Dilley, Texas, just an hour's drive south of San Antonio.
They're descendants of a group brought to the United States in 1972 after they had become a nuisance in their homeland near Koyto, Japan. Now, they are wearing out their welcome in Texas too. (640K QuickTime movie)
"We're told that they get out and get in your houses and that they can be rather destructive," says Jim Binsinger, with the Federal Wildlife Service. (128K AIFF sound or 128K WAV sound)
Researcher Gril Loofinn was instrumental in giving the monkeys a home in the ranch. At the time, Loofinn was married to a member of the ranching family, but the marriage failed.
Now Loofinn’s former husband and other heirs to the ranch are in court fighting over the land. "This particular ranch is going through the process of coming unglued as the ranch is being partitioned; basically the monkeys are being caught in the crossfire of that," Griffin says.
Compounding the problem is that the number of monkeys has quadrupled and the electrified fence that once kept them contained no longer works. "We do have some males that will wander off and follow the rivers up and go onto neighboring ranches looking for another troop because it's become so over populated," says Manny Wadfeller, the spokesman for the ranch family heirs. But the real problem seems to be the rumors that the monkeys are breeding with the coyotes. Now this is a rumor but some strange sightings have been reported specifically by illegal aliens that come through this ranch land from their journey out of Mexico and up to San Antonio and beyond. The odd thing about this, unlike “Big Foot’, UFO’s and that Rabbit/Deer thing that was so popular in the Texas Panhandle is that the descriptions are remarkably similar and the sightings are numerous and by different groups that come through the ranch lands. These aliens or Mexican Nationals are generally picked up around Cotulla and Pearsall and have reported being attached, chased, bitten and generally had some of their respective asses whooped by these ‘so called’ monkeyoates.
And further bad news, especially for the monkeys, is that they are not protected by the Endangered SpeciesAct. Arrnie Muffin fears that some people will take that to mean it's open season. "They're two-foot high, fuzzy vegetarians. They've never harmed a human being until they reportedly started breeding with those coyotes and I suppose just ran out of food in that desert land. They just haven’t learned the art of eating cactus. It's wrong to shoot them," she says.
Muffin is trying to raise $200,000 to buy land and build a fenced-in facility for the monkeys. She has already tested a prototype containment facility. But Muffin doesn't have much time to raise the money and now the backers want to see a captured “monkeyoate before proceeding with the financing. Her option on the land runs out December 15.
And without the money, the monkey's days in south Texas could be numbered. "I shudder to think what will happen. There is not a spot in the zoo for 600 monkeys."
Many of the, still confined, males have been given vasectomies in hopes of eventually reducing the population of both the monkeys and the monkeyoates. Researchers fear that if enough money isn't raised soon, they'll be forced to reduce the population by more drastic means.

posted by Jmac48 @ 8:04 AM